frankieh wrote:Later on when they are comfortable with Linux abit, most of them try different things and find one they like, but at least initially, KDE provides them with a familiar enviroment.SnapafunFrank wrote:
And therein lies the biggest problem of all....... Those or us who care to look for something different, have no problem with any GUI ( or not ) because we accept that Linux is another operating system, but still others looking for 'something' different are expecting a 'free' windows affair. Then there are the other users of our ' can only afford one ' hardware... they tend to come back "unhelpful" in our attempts to supply a 'more' affordable alternative, leaving some of us wishing we could be on a deserted island, heaps of batteries at the ready [ pun intended ] to play and work all day with our own informed choices. ( Then I suppose we get to be cast out altogether... nothing seems to work these days, does it.)
First off, let me say that not everything MS does is bad. Windows does do some stuff well, usually with regards to usability.
(before anyone calls me an MS shill, check the list of my stories on: http://htmlfixit.com/article_index.php )
I slag MS off on a regular basis, for all manner of reasons.
But having said that, they spend millions researching usability, and the fact is, they do that side of things very well.
Perhaps too well, they have made owning and using a PC, so easy that most people using windows have no idea that they need to protect themselves and their data from virus's, spyware, keyloggers and all that other stuff. (and Windows doesn't help them to protect themselves, at least before SP2 it didn't.)
My point is, its great to hate MS, as a corporation, they have renamed "morality" to "public relations". but from a GUI perspective, they do OK. In my years as a sys admin, I can tell you that I've seen hundreds of cases of complete PC newbies just using windows with no instruction or practise at all.
Just because something is "microsoft", doesn't automatically make it bad, MS have to work to achieve "bad", and when they want to, they do that very well too. (and they seem to want to do it allot.)
But if not for MS, we wouldn't have 300 million XP users to convert to Linux, and every second household in the western world would not have PC's.
I don't mind KDE, I don't mind Gnome, and I like IceWM and some of the smaller ones, the WM I choose for a system depends on the system it will be running on, and the user that will be using it. Myself I don't care, I can work with any WM.
In fact I'd go so far as to say I don't really understand these religious arguements about WM's, what are they really? a GUI framework for the desktop. Who cares really? as long as it runs the apps I need, I couldnt' care less what the WM is called.
My Only wish is that the toolkit providers (QT & GTK) worked together to arrive at something compatable, or wrapper libs or something so that app consistancy is on a par with other OS's. (it'd be nice to have wrapper libs for both ways, so if your system has QT, all apps use it, if it has GTK, all apps use that.) If the QT/GTK war hadn't been going on for years, we'd have a killer consistant professional GUI desktop right now and it wouldn't be dependent on what WM you choose.
-- rgds
Franki
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